On the 11th of March, the World Health Organisation officially declared COVID-19 to be a global pandemic. In response to this many governments further tightened social distancing and, in many cases, ordered the closure or banning of non-essential shops, services, events and travel. This has had a profound impact on both the general public, but also businesses, who are faced with the increasing challenges of managing and adapting their processes to the changing environment.

One such industry impacted is the insurance market, who are experiencing an unprecedented surge in the number of claims they are receiving from both individuals submitting claims for event and travel cancellations as well as businesses claiming under interruption and a wide variety of other liabilities.

Whilst the insurance industry is no stranger to sudden and uncontrollable surges, the recent flooding in the UK is a prime example, the unpredictability of such events, places insurers and their claims handling teams under pressure to respond and resolve cases as quickly as possible. This pressure is increased tenfold with the current situation because of the added challenges of remote working, reduction in teams due to self-isolation or sickness, as well as time-sensitive time frames for many customers.

Due to the nature of claims often being written in a highly descriptive manner and requiring several complex tasks to process, many insurance companies still rely on manual processing. This requires the claims team to carry out repetitive and labour-intensive tasks such as categorisation, data extraction and entry, validation and checks in order to process. For many insurers, the reduced staff and the volumes of claims currently being received are placing additional pressures on existing teams. This means these routine tasks become time-consuming, error-prone and remove the team from performing essential actions such as providing support to customers on the phone.

Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) technology could offer insurers vital additional support as they adapt to meet the challenges of a new world. IPA platforms deploy a combination of AI, Machine Learning, OCR, Natural Language Processing and RPA to automate the manually repetitive and labour-intensive tasks involved with claims processing as described above.. This not only speeds up claims processing significantly, but also frees up the claims handling team to focus on decision making and valuable, critical tasks.

As many IPA platforms are delivered in the cloud and as software as a service, there is a low cost of entry because there is no requirement for additional hardware making it easy for organisations to implement these solutions. In addition, the inclusion of Machine Learning algorithms within platforms, such as Celaton’s inSTREAM, mean that the platform is able to scale up processing on demand. There is no need for additional programming or recoding with every new claim or exception because it learns through the natural consequence of processing and through watching the actions and decisions of claims handlers. This means the platform is constantly optimised and scalable, saving organisations valuable time, resource and most significantly increasing efficiency.

Whilst the future is unclear and COVID - 19 has already impacted people’s lives inexplicably and changed how we all behave, possibly with lasting impacts for many years to come; automation can deliver some certainty to insurers through providing them with the ability to manage and respond to the challenges ahead, whilst still supporting customers.